


but we will still remain

by myliobatis



Series: highwomen [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:41:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22216462
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myliobatis/pseuds/myliobatis
Summary: Four women who tried to make the galaxy a better place, and died for it.
Series: highwomen [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1608331
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19





	but we will still remain

When Padmé is fourteen and newly elected Queen, an elderly councilor pats her arm and says, “You are your people’s mother now.”

Her initial reaction is disbelief. She might be in the role of a much older woman, but she’s still _fourteen_ , and anyways, a woman’s ability to lead has nothing to do with whether or not she has children.

Six months later, she is running, shooting, speaking to ten thousand Senators she’s never seen before, all to preserve the lives of her people, and she thinks she might understand what he had meant. She will do everything in her power to defend them, no matter the effect on herself.

Even if she does not always like all of her people, she loves them beyond description.

Fifteen years later, she gives birth, and her body and heart both are in agony.

She wonders if this is what the beginning of the end feels like.

Everything hurts, and people are watching (why are they _watching_?), and her husband isn’t here; he might not be anywhere, by now. The horror of their last interaction remains, though, and she knows that if he lives, he will stop at nothing to find her.

She doesn’t think that would end well for anyone.

If she dies, if she isn’t a threat or a promise anymore, maybe her children and her planet will be safe. She knows that he would come for her, eventually, and he would raze her beautiful Naboo to the ground to do it. Would endanger their children to do it.

It’s both the hardest and the easiest thing she’s ever done. It wrenches her heart to leave them behind, to abandon all of her dreams for them and for the galaxy, but everything hurts so much and she just wants it to stop. She can’t give her children much, like this, but she can give them the safety of her absence. The safety of telling this new Empire (and oh, the word sours in her gut) that there is nothing left to look for.

Padmé breathes her last; the two children of her body and the six hundred million more of her heart survive.

_(but she is still alive) ___

-

Barriss has always been a healer.

She’d been gifted as a girl, and that gift had bloomed into passion. She never feels as good, as useful, as _Jedi_ as when she can heal someone who seemed beyond hope.

Then the war comes.

Now her gift brings back men who were born to die, so that they can fight again, and die again. She can’t comprehend the sheer amount of pain and suffering the war causes; she can’t understand why she should be able to save one soldier only to leave him alone, all of his brothers dead in a conflict none of them had chosen. The agony seeps into her soul, and there’s never a break, there’s always more wounded, more dead, more war.

As time passes and the war grinds on, crushing ever more soldiers and civilians under its weight, Barriss begins to wonder if there isn’t a better way to heal it all.

She had been a quick study in the Halls of Healing; even though her talents lie in Force healing, she still knows the myriad of ways that inflicting a little pain on the body can save it from a thousandfold more later on.

Sometimes, you have to cut the cancer out before it can kill you.

But for all that the bomb goes off perfectly, it doesn’t work. They were supposed to _understand_ , to feel the pain that the rest of the galaxy was suffering. She was trying to _fix_ them, and all she receives in return is derision and a prison cell.

When the Republic falls, Barriss feels nothing beyond a sense of grim confirmation. She has hardened her heart to death; when the Force screams that the Jedi are dying, it is only a little more painful than any other battlefield she has stood upon. The Order had not listened, and in the end they are just as mortal as the clones they had lead to their ends.

The Empire comes for her not a standard month later, and she does not regret dying on this hill.

_(but she is living still)_

-

Aayla has been fighting her entire life, but she has never fought alone.

She lays her faith in those who fight with her, in the skill and comradeship of her fellows; in unity, the sum of one and one is hundreds.

When she is but a child, barely old enough to walk, she is kept amongst the Hutts. For her own protection, they say, though the safety of crimelords is dubious at best. And when that protection threatens her life, she fights for survival in the only way she can – by calling for help, by calling upon the Force.

And so her first ally arrives, and she is set on a path that will define the rest of her life.

Her memories are taken, betrayed by her own blood, but even then she still fights. Fights to avenge her family. Fights alongside a Darksider. Fights to become herself again. And when she struggles to remember, she is not alone; the Temple is filled with allies in peace, Masters and healers and friends.

Her Master betrays the Order, betrays her, betrays so many people that no-one can be sure what side he’s on, and she fights. Fights to save her life from the one who had saved it, so long ago. Fights with him to break Saleucami. Fights to save him from the darkness. Even now, in these times of twisting allegiances, there are always allies to be found, in the clones and in the other Jedi and even, once, in a very confused battle droid.

Her faith has been betrayed, and betrayed, and betrayed, but she does not let it break. Faith is meant to be tested.

The war struggles on, and she fights against the Sith, against the endless battle droids, against the despair. Fights for the Republic, for the Order, for the lives of her men. She believes in them even more than she believes in their common cause, trusts them to always have her back, to do their jobs so that she can do hers. So that she can keep fighting for what matters.

When they fire on her, when the final betrayal comes, she never hears the sound.

_(but she is still around)_

-

_(and if she had to, she would do it again, and again, and again)_

-

Leia was never meant to be the things she becomes.

Intentionally or not, she had been set on her mother’s path, just as her brother had been set on their father’s. The perfect diplomat, never a hair out of place, fighting with words and changing hearts. The princess of Alderaan may be a crack shot with a blaster, but she shouldn't run about in the mud practicing hand-to-hand combat.

The Force, however, cares little for _shouldn't_ , and she never met a challenge she didn’t best.

She lays down her saber, because the Force whispers that this path leads to the death of her heart, but a saber does not a Jedi make; nothing can take that from her, now that she has proved herself.

She was never meant to be leading another rebellion; this war was never meant to be fought a third time. But the galaxy turns a cold and uncaring eye on _meant to_ , and she becomes the General.

Her people need her, and so she comes, and fights again. Loses friends again. Bears witness to the pain and the struggle again. It _hurts_ , to survive for twenty years only to have the spectre of a long-dead past rise up within her own blood while her back is turned.

Leia has never let a little thing like pain stop her.

She is supposed to be the daughter of a darksider, not the mother, but the First Order takes _supposed to_ and crushes it along with every scrap of hope and joy it can reach. There is still Light in her son. This she knows, even if it has been nearly drowned by the Dark, even if nobody else believes.

She will never stop fighting for that Light.

And at the end, she lays her weapons down again, lays her body down for the last time. Her faith is in freedom and the Light, and no saber or plasma cannon will win the fight within one being’s heart.

She feels them win, the way they weren’t supposed to, and her spirit passes into the Force, finally unbound.

_(but she is still around)_

-

_(they are stories still untold, the daughters of the silent generations, hearts sent to die alone in foreign places)_

-

In Rey they are come again, and she _lives_.

**Author's Note:**

> gosh this universe sure is sad isn't it
> 
> This fic brought to you by two things: the song [Highwomen](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D-6nklMMbM) by The Highwomen, and my eternal anger about Padmé's stupid death scene.
> 
> I have nebulous plans to write a women-centric Star Wars fic for each of the songs on the Highwomen album, so keep an eye out for _Heaven is a Honky Tonk_ feat. Rey and the ghosts, among other ideas...


End file.
